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  She slid her feet noiselessly into her sandals and shoved a Detroit Tigers ball cap over her unbrushed brown hair. Hair that needed washing, since she’d skipped a shower the previous day in her rush to get out of Lansing. The chipped, pink polish on her toenails looked ragged as she stepped into the bright morning. The August sun, already a blistering orange, made her squint.

  From the front porch she watched the rippling water of Lake Michigan, the streaks of iridescent blue as the sun washed the lingering morning fog from the air. She felt good, and for the first time in months, had awoken that morning starved. The previous spring Abby had lost her appetite. She started waking up to a stomach twisted in knots. She tried vitamins, probiotics and eggs. Nick bought her real cranberry juice and lectured her on cutting dairy out of her diet, but nothing worked. She simply could not eat. She did, eventually, but every food tasted bland, and every bite went down with scratchy reluctance. After a few weeks, she’d given up trying to remedy the problem despite a weight loss that left her swimming in her pants.

  She rested a hand on her stomach and felt the rumbling within. The hunger seemed like an affirmation, proof that she had made the right choice. She still felt scared and a bit lonely, but those emotions paled in comparison to the vibrant quaking freedom that pulsated in her blood.

  She wanted—needed—to walk, and decided to use hunger as her excuse. Good Times Party Store, a small grocery store that she’d been visiting since childhood, was only a mile from Sydney’s house, and a pastry was calling to her.

  She turned off the road and into the trees, cutting along a deer path, a short cut. She trailed her fingers over the tall weeds, but watched her footing carefully. Several bouts of poison ivy had made Abby a wary woods traveler. Wary, but not absent. She loved the forest around Sydney’s house and knew its geography as surely as her parents' backyard.

  During her childhood, Abby stayed with her Aunt Sydney for two weeks every July. Abby loved Sydney and loved to escape from her overbearing mother. Becky had always over-packed for Abby, stuffing a red suitcase with totally ridiculous items like long underwear and q-tips.

  Abby looked forward to her mother’s over-packing because she knew that she and Sydney would laugh about it later.

  Abby’s mother, Becky, and her Aunt Sydney were night and day, the ‘dichotomous duo’ Sydney claimed their mother used to call them. Physically, they looked nothing alike. Becky was short, just over five feet tall and petite, her thin body often sheathed in baggy sweaters and loose jeans. Her shoulder-length, brown hair ratted easily, and she wore it back in a mousy ponytail that made her pointed features even more angular. Her skin was pale, her eyes brown and her thin lips often betrayed the large front teeth hiding beneath.

  Sydney, on the other hand, looked like a Bond girl, or that’s what Harold had always called her. She, too, was short, but had waist-length, blond hair that she wore down her back. Her blue eyes shone beneath long black lashes. Her wardrobe included tight and skin tight, and the boob job that Harold bought her looked real – at least to Abby, who at fourteen had not understood why someone like Sydney would need new boobs. Becky told Abby that Sydney was trying to simulate the engorged feeling of breast milk because she was barren, which Abby had understood to be a jab.

  Becky’s world included knitting, the home shopping network and housework. Sydney left a mess, considered ‘swinging’ to be the relationship of the future and refused to turn on the TV in any season except winter.

  Abby stooped to smell a bush of white lilacs. She savored the sweet scent and plucked a few petals. Abby had inherited her mother’s looks—mostly. She was short and skinny and flat-chested. Her hair, now at her shoulders, was a lighter shade of brown than her mother’s, but snarled easily and puffed up like an angry cat during humidity. She learned when young that hats were her friends. Her lips were plump like Sydney’s, but she had her mother’s brown eyes and small, pointed nose. She considered herself average, and most of the men she met labeled her ‘cute,’ not a very inspiring brand.

  Nick did not stand apart in this category. The first time she met him, while studying at MSU’s business library, he called her ‘sweet’. At the time, it seemed like a huge compliment, considering it was finals' week, she had a mouthful of Chili Cheese Fritos, and she had not bothered to brush her hair in two days.

  Nick had been average looking with broad shoulders and blond hair buzzed close to his head. He asked her out, she complied, and their relationship became as predictable as a Danielle Steel novel. Abby’s mother loved Nick.

  Initially, Abby liked him too. She liked his ambition to become an attorney. In the first six months of their relationship, she enjoyed spending weekends visiting his law school friends, who talked politics and boasted about their insomnia. He was still courting her then, trying to win her over. He brought flowers and burned her CDs. He cooked dinner, gave her massages and called her incessantly.

  But after their one-year anniversary, she found the footing beneath their relationship started to slip. Grad school was taking its toll, and Nick lived and breathed statutes and contracts. He got angry easily, brushed off her hurt feelings and started to lecture her on being a supportive partner. She realized that any future with him would look strangely like her mother’s. Not that Abby’s dad was an attorney; he was a real estate agent, but his wife treated him like the Pope. She washed, scrubbed, ironed and cooked her way to his heart. She expected Abby to do the same, and when Abby complained that Nick had changed, her mother looked at her with such disgust that Abby never brought it up again.

  She walked into a thin netting of spider-webs and stopped, pulling the silky threads from her face and neck. The deer path, buried beneath weeds, had practically disappeared. She wished for tennis shoes rather than flip-flops. Twigs and leaves found their way into the crevice between her foot and sandal, and she leaned down - pulling them free. The sun, hot and getting hotter, drove rays through the thick leaves overhead. A chipmunk darted past her and paused, turning to stare from a nearby tree stump. He twittered and sped away, over the trunk and into a thick bed of nettles.

  Abby wished she had worn socks or taken the road, anything to save her sensitive skin from the various pricking plants lurking nearby. She had slipped on one of Sydney’s red windbreakers, but her legs, below her shorts, were bare.

  She leaned close to the ground, found the deer path and continued forward, stepping around a tall bull thistle popping with hairy purple flowers, and remembered her mother scolding her for touching one of the sharp plants as a child.

  Beyond the thistle, more color caught her eye, and she veered from the path. A piece of fabric, tattered and blue, clung on a low tree branch, like a long forgotten flag, meaningless without its worshippers. Abby stretched out, touched it and pulled away disgusted. The fabric was wet, slimy even, and she reached to wipe her fingers on her shorts, but stopped. A smear of red painted her pale fingertips. It was not the red of paint, nor chalk or marker. It was a deep red, brown and thick. She did not need to move her face closer to smell the coppery scent; the air hung with the metallic tinge of the cloth. She dropped it and stepped back.

  She began to turn away, to disregard the startling find, but curiosity stole her good sense. She looked down over glistening green ferns and mossy branches. Her eyes landed on a sliver of white flesh, as stark as the moon, bedded in the browns around it. The flesh grew larger as she walked, trancelike, towards it. Painted toenails, a red-orange color like the inside of a papaya, came into view. From feet caked with dirt, Abby’s gaze moved higher up bare legs. She saw the woman fully then, her naked torso splotched with blood, leaves tangled in her pubic hair.

  Chapter 3

  A black, oily crow took flight near the head of the body and Abby gasped and stumbled back, hooking her arm on a young tree and clinging to it for balance. The body, the woman, stared vacantly, her lips parted. Streams of red hair framed her face, twigs caught in the thick tendrils. Abby could see her; she could see the corpse, t
he young woman’s body. She also felt her, felt more than the dead thing waiting for the woods to devour it.

  A whisper stole across her cheek, a warning, and Abby ran. She twisted away from the grave and sprinted through the trees, holding her arms up to shield the branches that scraped against her. Too numb to feel the nettles and picker bushes, she did not pause when her flip-flop caught on a patch of brush and stayed behind. Instead, she tore from the woods and back onto pavement.

  Beyond the trees, the sky opened to piercing white light in a sea of blue and Abby slowed, panting.

  She limped, one sandal lost, along the pocked road. Her Tigers cap was gone, her bare foot ached, and her heart was rapid in her ears.

  Sound was muted and distant, an invisible wall muffled everything except the slap of her single flip-flop on the paved road. Her hands shook, and to her horror, she saw the streak of blood still coating her fingertips. She started to wipe it away and then realized that the blood was evidence - she couldn’t touch it. She may have already contaminated the scene. Her mouth hung open, her tongue dry and thick, and she swallowed, but nothing slipped down the dusty channel of her throat.

  She turned down Sydney’s driveway and then ran, banging through the front door. The house, silent, greeted her.

  Sebastian, still on the couch, sat up, startled.

  “There’s a dead body in the woods!” Abby shrieked, scaring herself and Sebastian both.

  He didn’t move, perhaps wondering if Sydney’s niece was insane.

  “A body, a girl, she’s…she’s dead.”

  Comprehension dawned slowly, and he stood up, disoriented, sleep shrinking his pupils.

  “Wait, wait,” he held up a hand and then his eyes traveled from her face to the blood on her hand - to the single sandal on her foot. He shook his head from side to side, believing, but still too tired to grasp the situation fully.

  “I have to call the police,” she stammered, moving to the living room where a gray house phone sat coiled in its cord.

  She picked up the receiver, using her left hand—the one not smeared with blood—and punched 9-1-1.

  The operator picked up. Sebastian walked to the kitchen, filled a glass with water and returned it to Abby.

  She balanced the phone against her shoulder and drank.

  “I’m sorry, honey, what’d you say?” the operator asked again.

  Abby gritted her teeth and repeated that she had discovered a dead body.

  “A dead body? Here in Trager City?”

  “Yes,” Abby cried, nearly overcome with rage at the operator’s incompetence. “Yes, a dead body, DEAD!”

  Finally, the operator started asking legitimate questions, and Abby started to calm down.

  She hung up and leaned back against the couch, squeezing her eyes closed.

  “What can I do?” Sebastian asked, standing beside the couch and looking agitated.

  Abby sat motionless, her palms up.

  “I have no idea, no idea,” she blinked and tried to convey some meaning in her words. “I have to go back. They said I should wait for the police.” She gestured toward the door, sick at the thought of returning to the body.

  “I’ll come with you,” Sebastian declared, finding his sandals and slipping them on. He brought her a pair of tennis shoes and helped her tie them as she held her bloody hand away from the arms of the couch.

  * * * *

  When they stepped out of the woods, Sebastian looked as shocked as Abby felt. He had stared at the body for a long time and then abruptly turned and left. Abby had to struggle to keep up with him as he lit out of the trees. Back in the sunlight, he found a patch of grass and sat down roughly. Abby took a seat beside him, tucking her knees beneath her.

  An assembly of birds sang from the trees, and Abby could imagine the tourists as they roused from their tents to cold cereal and showers in the lake. A station wagon, packed with kids, ambled by, their faces plastered against the windows. Abby watched them go and felt a stab of homesickness. She suddenly, for the first time since her departure, missed her mother. She wanted someone to hug her, to stroke her hair and whisper that all those gruesome images floating in her brain were fiction.

  On any other Sunday, Abby would have been sprawled out on the living room floor, drinking coffee and flipping through the newspaper, while Nick meticulously dusted all of their furniture. The image of Nick with his dust rag was enough to reassure her that she had made the right choice. She could not spend her life, her youth, with a man who spent every Sunday spring-cleaning, who forced her onto the couch with her paper and coffee so that he could vacuum the pristine carpet. What a giant leap Sebastian was from Nick. Amazing that they were the same sex at all.

  Sebastian leaned against a tree, silent. After several minutes, he spoke, his eyes still closed.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  Abby stared at her hand. She’d placed a plastic baggie over it at Sydney’s, and some of the blood had smeared onto the plastic.

  “Yes,” she replied, looking at the trees across the street. “Relatively speaking.”

  He nodded and opened his eyes, looking at her. His eyes, beneath the sun, looked like twin shining pebbles, his black pupils narrow blemishes on an otherwise flawless stone. He picked a dandelion and rubbed the yellow across his hand, leaving a mustard streak.

  “Death is terrible. That kind of death—” He hooked a thumb at the woods behind them “—is indescribable.”

  Abby agreed. She could not have conjured a portrait of the dead woman before seeing her. Death for Abby was a shallow pool of grandparents that she barely knew laid out in satin lined beds and sheathed beneath layers of thick foundation. Beyond that - death belonged to slasher movies and television dramas.

  * * * *

  Several minutes passed, and Abby relaxed against a white birch, feeling the frayed bark tickling her scalp. Across the street, the woods were dense, their boughs colliding in the strangled space. She let her eyes dip and soar along the tree trunks, not really looking for anything more than a fixation. As her gaze trailed left, she caught movement among the branches, nothing drastic, just a shift in shadows. She moved onto her knees and then stood, squinting into the forest.

  Sebastian fidgeted next to her.

  “What is it?” he asked, standing.

  “I don’t know, nothing maybe.”

  “Where?”

  She pointed a finger, trembling - she saw, but did not feel confident that she pointed at anything more than a crow nesting in the leaves. Still, something prickled along her skin, and the fine hairs of her neck stood erect. If a crow peered out from those trees, he must have been staring at her very intently because she could feel eyes like fingers dancing over her.

  Sebastian’s face pinched as he stared, his blue eyes narrowed and then his head jerked with movement that she, too, saw. A dark shape had disembarked from the trees. Abby saw a flash of black hood and then nothing.

  Chapter 4

  She started to say, “The police will be here soon.” But Sebastian was gone, sprinting across the street, a billow of dust alighting on the roadside around him. He disappeared into the brush, his body crashing through branches and his arms up to shield his face.

  “What just happened?” Abby asked aloud to no one. Had Sebastian really just run into the woods? Most likely scaring the daylights out of some wayward hiker who’d simply wandered off the beaten path. She could hear the muffled sounds of snapping twigs and mashing weeds and wondered if maybe he had found someone back there.

  A police cruiser, lights flashing, pulled off the road in front of her. Abby ran over, ready to send him into the woods to save Sebastian.

  A stocky officer heaved himself from the car, his navy blue uniform taut against his thick belly.

  “I’m Officer Gray.” He thrust a meaty hand towards her.

  “We don’t have time for that,” she spat, ignoring his hand. “My friend…” She turned, pointing to the woods, but Sebastian was there. He exit
ed the trees and jogged over, leaves burrowed in his curls. His eyes looked wild, and he gave Abby a long, significant stare before turning to the officer.

  “What were you saying, Miss?” Officer Gray asked, hiking his pants up unsuccessfully. They continued to sag below his belly.

  Abby swallowed and shook her head slowly. “Ummm, just that, she’s there in the woods behind us.”

  He looked at her for a moment and then nodded abruptly. Apparently he assumed all witnesses to dead bodies acted irrationally.

  "What's goin' on with your hand there?" he asked.

  "Oh." She held it up as if she too had forgotten the blood smeared on her hand.

  "It's from the woods. I touched something, a piece of cloth…" She trailed off.

  He stared at it a moment longer and then nodded slowly.

  “And which of you called in the report?” His watery eyes moved toward the line of trees.

  “I did.” Abby said, ignoring Sebastian’s gaze.

  “I’ll need you to go ahead and show me the way.”

  He pulled a radio off his belt, calling for an ambulance and backup.

  Abby turned but shot a furtive glance at Sebastian. He nodded that she should go ahead.

  She followed the familiar path and stopped short, this time pointing toward the body, but preferring not to look again. The officer moved in, holding his breath in nervous anticipation. He moaned, a little painfully, and pulled his radio back out as the body came into view. Abby listened as he radioed a description. She turned nervously and scanned the woods around her. Had Sebastian seen someone?

  Not sure whether to stay or walk back to the road, she sat down on a decaying log that crumbled slightly, revealing layers of bark turned ashy. The trees hovered, their green leaves lush and thick with life. A red squirrel fled across the branches, leaping great stretches and clutching flimsy perches with his tiny feet.